This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop a highly versatile confocal fiber optic module (CFOM) which can be easily adapted to existing microscopes. The CFOM system, proposed by Intelligent Optical Systems (IOS), utilizes state-of-the-art optical fiber technology to offer extreme compactness, multiple light coupling/excitation (l x N coupling), minimal adjustment, and very low cost. While confocal microscopy has become a powerful tool, current confocal microscopes, based on free-space optics, lack versatility. Conventional confocal microscope optics are bulky, and the enormous cost of commercially available confocal instruments has prevented most researchers from sharing in the advantages offered by this highly powerful technology. With the continuing scarcity of funds and tightening of budgets, confocal microscopes are becoming less and less available to researchers. A unique advantage of IOS's device for conventional confocal microscopy is the fact that it can be sold as a "retrofittable" unit. This unit can be added to most existing commercial microscopes to facilitate a variety of biomedical applications. The use of fiber optics-based module offers confocal microscope capability will significantly reduce the cost of the system, increase the versatility of the wavelength selection, and increase the popularity of using confocal effect for many different important applications.
